Our weeks are going really fast lately but the kiddos are still tuned in and working hard! I just want to give a big thanks to all of the parents, grandparents, and friends that came out to support your children in their interest fair. They all did a great job!

In knight time we read the story Life on the Ice which was a great connection for the third graders of the continent of Antarctica. We learned a lot about why people don’t live there and how planes coming in have to adjust to the freezing cold climate. We also learned that if you happened to sweat on Antarctica, ice will form on your body which will lead to a lot of pain. Yikes! In writing we started working on creating facts vs. opinions and wrote an informational paragraph about what we can do during outdoor recess. This week we started reading biographies about famous people of our choice and we will write up biographies about the people that we are reading about.

In math we are starting to do an overall review of the math themes that we’ve learned this year. On Monday we worked on money and practiced counting coins and dollar bills, shopped to buy multiple items from a store, and practiced subtracting our totals from money we “had in our pockets.” On Tuesday we reviewed time to the minute and continued working on mastering elapsed time both backwards and forwards. Wednesday we worked on identifying information from various graphs – bar, pictograph, and line plots. On Thursday we reviewed 3-D shapes and identified their names, faces, edges, and vertices. Finally on Friday we continued working on determining symmetry of random shapes and we also worked on decimal work into the 100ths. This week we will be continuing review but we will be focusing on learning how divide bigger numbers where you’ll need to take more than 10 out of.

In science we started learning about motion and design by creating slides and learning about how they work. We created our own slides out of cardboard and used sliders to figure out what goes into creating a slide. We learned that it needs a slope in order to work correctly and that they heavier the weight of our slider, the faster it went down. This week we will be opening up our Einstein kit and start creating cars. We will be learning about force and gravity in connection to motion.

In religion we talked about how the choices we make can be either good or bad because God gave us free choice to make our own decisions. We also talked about how God helps us every day by blessing us with a conscience that helps us decide when our decisions are right or wrong. When we make the wrong decision, or oftentimes sin, we have many things we can do to get back on the right path with God. We can seek forgiveness through reconciliation, say we’re sorry to the person we’ve hurt, and repair the wrong behavior by doing something positive for others. It was overall a great reminder to us that we choose to make positive choices every day and that even though sometimes it’s hard, it makes us feel good in the end!